The Top 4 Signs You’re a Career Recruiter

Everyone’s career affects them. A friend of mine has been managing a Pharmacy and Retail Store for years and he’s developed a rather odd perception towards his customers…he doesn’t really like them.  Lawyers fear getting cornered at parties for free legal advice. And health professionals?  They hate everyone always calling them about their strange medical problems.  Just go see your Doctor for God’s sake.  Well, it’s the same for Recruiters.  We carry the badges and scars of our profession around with us too.

Have you ever found yourself at a party sizing up your candidates? Er, I mean friends. As a Recruiter we spend our day not just hunting talent, but setting expectations, balancing schedules and frankly, stalling our butts off when clients or candidates throw curveballs our way.  So how do you know your one of the lucky few Career Recruiters out there?

Here are a few tell tale signs that you are, in fact, a career recruiter!

 1.Expecting the Worst…You Pessimist, You: As a Recruiter we like making placements. I don’t care if you’re a Corporate Recruiter or an Agency Recruiter; you like closing a job successfully.  But far too often a curveball gets thrown our way.  Maybe a Hiring Manager changes a job description.  Or maybe a budget has evaporated. Maybe the candidate is a no-show.  Bottom line, once you’ve done this for awhile, you come to expect those curveballs.  Case and point: I received a cryptic email from a candidate earlier this evening. “Call me.”  Now, I had just made an offer to the candidate and it was the salary he wanted, the job he was psyched about and the company that he loved.  So why did I automatically assume it was bad news? Because I’ve been doing this for awhile now.  It turns out that he just wanted to say thank you, from him and his wife.  Yeah…I felt kind of guilty for thinking he was going to ruin my night.

 2.Everyone is a Candidate: Seriously, have you ever stood at a party or with a group of friends thinking about how ‘placeable’ someone is?  If you’re spending time on Recruiter.com, I bet you have.  We get paid to be judgmental (astute) and that’s not always a bad thing.  If you’ve honed your skills over the years and you can just tell when someone is a home-run, you’re a Career Recruiter.  If you unconsciously judge, characterize and sort your friends’ ability to kill an interview, you’re a Lifer. One of my best clients was broken wide open when I went to a party and met my friend’s new fiancee.  I placed him within a week and with all of his referrals I had a fantastic year.  Hey, sometimes being judgmental (I mean perceptive) is a real bonus.

 3.Obsessively Interested in Where People Work: America is a funny place.  If you travel abroad you’ll find that people don’t automatically meet and start discussing where they work and what they do.  It’s fairly unique to Americans….and Recruiters; it’s part of our self-training over the years.  Our ears perk up and professional mode kicks in anytime someone starts talking about where they work, what they do or who their boss is.  We can’t help it.  I mean, it’s just good business.  Have you ever noticed over time that you’re the creepy guy or gal who always brings the subject back to someone’s Company or work?  More than likely you haven’t noticed, but you’re likely doing it.  Instead, you probably walk out of social situations completely oblivious to anything other than sorting the details you’ve just learned about a particular company and how you might engage with them.

 4. You Avoid Family and Friends: Friends Facebook, Gmail, Tweet and G+ me constantly with resume and job questions.  I always try to help but it just gets more and more difficult.  But it gets worse when friends of friend or friends of family start reaching out to you for help and advice.  There’s a big misconception about what it is Recruiters do.  Most people outside the profession think that we work to help people get jobs. Laudable, but not quite right. We work to fill positions for our Companies or Clients, not the other way around.  So when the numbers of friends, family and acquaintances reaching out to you gets to be too much, you probably find yourself avoiding those people.  Have you ever politely tried to avoid your brother’s buddy? Or maybe your Mother’s best friend’s son?  I know I have.

When you get right down to it, Recruiters are busy people.  We’re juggling a lot of people, a lot of expectations and a lot of outcomes.  And while a tendency to avoid some family functions or constantly qualify friends might seem like a negative at first, it’s really a positive.  It means you’re good at what you do and it’s starting to become second nature.  Everyone who’s good at their career wears just a bit of it on their sleeve.  Happy Hunting!

http://www.recruiter.com/

Should You Start A Career In Recruiting?

Most recruiting professionals seem to have fallen into their career by chance, luck, or fate. You don’t often (if ever) hear kids saying they want to grow up and be a recruiter. Recruiting also isn’t typically the first thing on the tip of your tongue when you’re thinking about a new career path. So where do recruiters come from? How are they made? Are some people just born to be recruiters?   

There’s no doubt that recruiters are passionate about what they do. They love tracking down great talent and making placements. The satisfaction of a good match keeps them going. You have to be in tune with the industry in order to survive in it. And maybe that’s not something you can learn or be taught. It’s possible that some people are just innately predisposed to be recruiters in the same way that some individuals are born to be natural leaders.

So if you’re thinking about starting a career in recruiting, ask yourself if you already have the following traits… or if a friend of yours is thinking about getting into the industry, ask them if they have these traits that maybe you take for granted in yourself:

 ◦Invested in Success: To be successful in recruiting, you don’t have to be some kind of megalomaniac or be hell-bent on “success,” whatever that means. However, you do have to care very deeply about professional advancement and peoples’ careers. You have to be invested in candidates and companies, which means caring about job satisfaction, personal issues, and career advancement. This translates into your own work as well – recruiters have to always be expanding their knowledge-base and connections. Recruiters have to believe that jobs, work, and professional success matter deeply to people’s lives and they must believe in the possibility of improvement.

 ◦Self-starter: In recruiting, no-one’s going to stand over your shoulder or hold your hand while you make phone calls. Only the independent will prosper. It’s up to you to research the right candidates, make the calls, set up appointments, push the interview, etc. If you have anxiety over talking to strangers or thinking on your feet, recruiting might not be the industry for you.

 ◦Detective: Love a good mystery? Recruiters need to love detective work. The issue in recruiting is that it’s really not like fitting together puzzle pieces. You don’t know exactly what you are looking for. You have to be able to take a rough idea and then hunt it down – recruiters “get” the position, and then identify the match when they see it. It’s an odd skill set, really – you have to be comfortable with using inexact and changing clues to find people, that are also unpredictable and unreliable. You have to be comfortable with this imprecision, but more importantly, enjoy the hunt for something as elusive and changing as human talent.

 ◦Strong Communicator: Are you persuasive? Do you know how to say the right thing at the right time? Better yet – do you know how to listen? Recruiting isn’t about finding any old candidate of the street and getting them to sign on the dotted line, it’s about finding the right candidate for the right job. Your decision making process will be largely guided by the questions you ask and the answers you receive.

 ◦Driven by results: Sales makes the world go ’round – or at least it needs to make your would go round if you want to stay motivated. If you get excited about the quality and quantity of your work, then recruiting might be a great career choice for you. While you can certainly teach someone to make sales or drive customer behavior, you can’t force them to love it – that’s a passion you need to have inside of you. Recruitment, whether corporate or agency, is large self-directed: you will get out of recruiting only what you put into it.

 ◦Free-Wheelin’: It is always said that over analysis has killed many a placement. Recruiters have to be able to “get out of their own way” to make connections. Could you look at a resume and in twenty seconds be comfortable with whether or not that person might be a right fit? Recruiters are essentially brokers: this means finding the right fit and bringing two parties together.Highly analytical people tend not to do well in recruiting, as there is a high volume of input (screening resumes) and output (talking to managers, setting up interviews.) If you spend a lot of time over-thinking everything, this high input/output scenario is a difficult proposition.

While you can train a good recruiter to become a great recruiter, the initial building blocks need to be there for that person to cut it in recruiting for the long term. Without passion and an ambitious attitude, most people get frustrated with the job and give up. There’s a reason the industry has such a high turnover rate – fresh recruiters just don’t last. It takes a special and unique kind of person to succeed in recruiting.

If you’re in recruiting and love your job, be thankful that you found the profession or that the profession found you. If you’re thinking about getting into recruiting, do some soul searching before you dive in – recruiting isn’t for everybody, but for some people, it’s the only field that makes sense.
http://www.recruiter.com

Smart Choices: Hiring the Right People

Need an office manager or a front-desk person? Pay and benefits are important but a successful search may depend more on patience. Physicians — most of whom are accustomed to making quick decisions — often don’t put enough time or thought into hiring, says Elizabeth Woodcock, an Atlanta-based practice management expert.

“Until physicians come to realize that they are leading multimillion-dollar businesses, they will tend to hire the wrong people,” Woodcock says.

Wrong as in promoting the longtime staff member who’s easy to work with but who may not have the ability to lead the staff, learn the complexities of a large-scale business or influence customer satisfaction.

In order to hire the right person for the job, follow a structured approach and don’t make these common mistakes when making hiring decisions.

• Don’t read the resume and/or determine the interview questions for the first time while the candidate is in the office. Do prepare thoroughly by developing interview questions that get to the heart of whether the candidate can do the job. Here are a few sample questions to guide your evaluations of potential employees:

1. Customer service: “Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a patient complaint.”

2. Priority management: “Tell me about an occasion when you had two doctors or bosses ask you to do conflicting tasks. How did you handle this dilemma?”

3. Response to office politics and gossip: “Tell me about a time at work when a co-worker complained to you about other employees or office policies and procedures, concluding with ‘Don’t you think so too?’ How did you respond?”

• Don’t jump to a conclusion about a candidate in the first few minutes of the interview…then spend the rest of the interview validating your opinion. Do remain objective and balanced.

• Don’t complete an interview without having a good enough understanding about a candidate to make a selection decision. Do end your interview when you can make a selection decision about the candidate.

• Don’t do most of the talking. Do allow the candidate to do most of the talking.

• Don’t describe the job at the beginning of the interview. Do describe the job after you have determined that the candidate has the competencies to do the job.

• Don’t sequence interviews with each interviewer asking the same questions of the candidate. Do have each interviewer ask different questions.

• Don’t ask each candidate interviewing for the same job a different set of questions. Do ask each candidate the same set of questions so you can compare them equally.

• Don’t forget key points about the candidate later. Do take good notes.

• Don’t ask only close-ended (“yes” or “no”) questions. Do ask open-ended questions.

• Don’t allow interruptions (i.e., phone calls and people walking in) to interfere with the interview. Do schedule the interview during a time when you will not be interrupted.

• Don’t hire a candidate who may have falsified information. Do make reference checks.

• Don’t ask discriminatory or inappropriate questions, like, “When did you graduate from high school?” and “Do you have someone who can take care of a sick child?” Do ask questions that are relevant to the job requirements.

Finally, take your time to select the best person for the job. The results of your decision can affect office morale, customer satisfaction, your free time and the bottom line.

http://www.recruiter.com/

Working with Recruiters

Working with recruiters is the next best thing to working with hiring managers. Recruitment professionals know their clients and they pride themselves on knowing their candidates in the hopes of making the right connections. In order to make this happen there are a few things you need to know:

TELL THEM EVERYTHING:
When building a relationship with a recruiter, this is no time to be shy. Recruiters need to know everything there is to know about you and what you are looking for in your career, i.e. salary, perks, specific employers, etc. Building an effective relationship with a professional recruiter starts with trust and honesty, so be forthcoming with your requests.

FIND OUT EVERYTHING:
Relationships are a two way street. When working with a professional recruiter you need to know as much about them as it relates to their capabilities and ability to help you secure employment. Do a thorough background check on the recruiter and/or the company. Review all the social networking sites where the recruiter does business and if they do not recruit via these new mediums, be aware; it might mean that they are not keeping up with workforce trends and new recruiting practices.

COMMUNICATE OFTEN:
Unfortunately securing a recruitment professional does not mean you will secure employment immediately. There can be a lot of waiting involved. Sitting still and waiting for the phone to ring is not an option for you. You are part of the communication equation and you must take an active role in all aspects of your career.
Approach your job hunt like you already have a job. If you see something online, hear about it on a website, see it on the news – contact your recruitment professional and collaborate with them on a game plan. Good recruiters are savvy and well connected, like real estate agents. They tend to know where all the hot properties are. However, they can not be everywhere, so the more hands they can have working in your favor the better.

BE REALISTIC:
Understand that you are not the recruiters’ only client. Schedule standing meetings no matter how short; just get them on the calendar. Recruiters understand your urgency however they have other clients asking for the same things. Work with your recruitment professional to set realistic goals that are effective and actionable.

http://www.recruiter.com/

Working with Recruiters Made Easy

Your average job seeker just doesn’t “get” what a recruiter does. This is apparent to anyone that’s ever heard a friend or relative complain about a recruiter “not finding them a job.” If you’re planning on working with recruiters or with a staffing firm, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Tips for Working with Recruiters

• Recruiters don’t find people jobs: The average job seeker has it all mixed up – recruiters don’t go out and find jobs, recruiters find candidates. They match candidates with open positions given to them by their client companies. Recruiters are tasked with filling these job requisitions. If you’re planning on working with recruiters, understand that they are often looking for very specific types of candidates – don’t get offended if you don’t match.
• Recruiters are part of the bigger picture: With this in mind, job seekers should embrace one or more recruiters as part of their overall job seeking strategy – not as an end-all solution. Professional networking, social media sites, and other job seeking channels should still be utilized to maximize individual job leads. Job seekers should recognize that recruiters can open additional doors for them and are inevitably part of the larger job market landscape.
• Recruiters and job seekers need to work together: It’s all about teamwork. Job seekers should be honest about their credentials and in turn, recruiters will work hard to push their profile towards befitting opportunities. Be open and upfront about your current compensation and future expectations and recruiters will get the interviews rolling. If everything works out, the recruiter makes a placement and you get a new job – both sides win when there’s mutual respect and understanding.

All too often, job seekers throw themselves at recruiters and expect royal treatment. Candidates have a hard time accepting the fact that recruiters don’t work for them, but with them. Recruiters always have your best interests in mind (and they want you to get hired), but they can’t make individually tailored jobs appear out of thin air.

Seeing eye-to-eye with recruiters isn’t all that complicated when you use their services as one of many valuable resources in your job seeking toolbox. If you are looking for a job, make sure you pursue every avenue available to you – and that working with recruiters in the correct fashion is part of your job search strategy.

http://www.recruiter.com/

Why Recruiting Looks Easy

There is an absolutely wonderful children’s book called 20 Heartbeats about a painter who paints a horse for a very wealthy man. I hate to ruin it for you, but I have to say what happens.

The rich man pays this famous painter to paint his favorite horse. But years go by and the painter won’t finish the painting. The rich man finally shows up at the painter’s house and demands the painting. The painter obligingly whips out a piece of parchment, dashes off a horse in black ink with his brush, and then hands the painting to the rich man. All this takes less than the time of 20 heartbeats.

The rich man is, of course, aghast. He storms after the painter to demand his money back. However, as he walks after the painter, he sees what has been taking so long.

All along the walls are hundreds and hundreds of painted horses. The painter wasn’t procrastinating, he was practicing. The rich man then finally takes a look at the painting that he purchased so long ago, now in his hands. It’s a perfect horse, a horse so real that he whistles to it.

As every art form takes discipline and practice to look easy, every kind of work takes years of diligence to perfect. Recruiting is no different, but few professions look so simple. It’s really hard to pass along a piece of paper, right? You can almost hear hiring managers thinking to themselves, “Yeah, I’ll bet your fingers are really tired from dragging all those resumes from a folder into an email. Real hard work.” Few jobs seem so easy to duplicate.

The end product of recruiting, for one thing, is someone’s else’s work – it is someone else’s talent, ability to interview, and everything else they have that gets them hired that is the end product of the recruiter’s process. It’s hard to pinpoint the recruiter’s exact role in this pseudo-science. Did they identify the talent? Spot them? Find them? Assess them? Understand the job? The culture? Have the right database? The right connections? The right insight into the department or hiring manager psychology? Did they make a lot of calls or know some secret strings to search for in Google? It’s hard to say what it is exactly that the recruiter does and so it’s easy to discount the recruiter’s role entirely.

However, we might be looking at it wrong. A recruiter’s value can’t be found within the process of a single hire. It can’t be found in that space that sometimes spans twenty heartbeats between talking to a manager about a job to the identification of a possible talent.

You have to look at everything that comes before that identification to see the value of a good recruiter. A great recruiter creates the conditions for that magic luck to strike. They don’t talk to a lot of different people. They talk to everyone. They don’t want to know their clients or their company’s competitors. They want to know everything that’s happening at every company in their area. It’s a massive amount of work that requires constant rejection, failure, stress, and is compounded by the minutiae of job offers and the uncertainty of human emotion.

That’s why very few succeed at recruiting. It’s not like there is anything special about that one placement. There is nothing about identifying a candidate and getting them a job offer that requires any particular kind of magic, or even a college degree for that matter. Unlike a beautiful painting, anyone or any recruiter can luck out and make a placement or two. But the background required for long-term recruiting success is much different. It involves the deep study of companies, products, markets, assessment, and professions coupled with a kind of brute force stamina to doggedly pursue the talents of other people. This is the process that forges the recruiter’s talent. This talent, when functioning at its best, is impossible to find.

Article from Recruiter.com

Women: 5 Ways to Supersize Your Business

Women are starting businesses at a record rate, but the number that

break a million in revenues is flat. What's up with that?

The start-up rate of women-owned businesses is soaring while the number in the big leagues—well above $1 million in revenue—is stagnating, according to The American Express OPEN State of Women-Owned Businesses Report. That doesn't serve anyone's interest.  As the Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers, a report from the Kauffman Foundation shows, getting those women-owned businesses on a high-growth track would energize our sluggish economy.

But it’s not happening Why?

I’ve been asking successful women owners what they think is holding back their counterparts, and here’s what they say:

Women need to take more risk. When women start a businesses, they think too far ahead, to the day when they’ll be managing a family as well as a business.They opt for career paths that seem safer and more flexible than running a major corporation.
Liz Etling, CEO and founder of global language service provider TransPerfect, advocates another tack: Go for broke when you are young and have nothing to lose. Don’t worry about what your life will be like in 10 years. Dream big and follow your dreams. When your business grows, so do your options for work/life balance.

And being a high-powered CEO doesn’t mean you can’t be a good mom. “If you want to have a family and run a business, you can — and a growing number of us do,” says Etling.

Women need to get tougher. Nice girls please people. CEOs have to make tough decisions, from firing people to cutting services. In a man, that’s being strong; in a woman it is seen as being bitchy. “If you want everyone to like you, you will have a hard time doing what is necessary,” Etling says.

Men need to get over themselves. At home, men must share in household responsibilities, recognizing that their partner’s career is as valuable as their own. At work, men need to be more inclusive. Networking events shouldn’t be just guy things. Deals are done in informal settings after the conference or out of the office — on golf courses and in the corporate box at the ball game. Yes, some women like sports but a lot are left out of that schmoozing and dealing.

It’s not that men are circling the wagons; they’re just not thinking it through. They’re losing, too, when possibly great deals get left at the clubhouse.

Women need to get over themselves, too. Whether in peer groups, such as the Women Presidents’ Organization or through mentoring women starting out, women need to support and mentor each other, As Sheila Lirio Marcel, CEO of Care.com says, “We must lift as we climb, bring others along with us and collect talented people as we rise.”

Men know how to network. Women seem to be falling behind. That needs to change.

Everyone needs to build more flexible businesses. Let’s start firms that don’t follow the same old businesses model; let’s build a model that can accommodate the differing needs of GenY, parents, Type A workers, and those who want to work reduced hours. You can retain and grow talent by being flexible — flexible about taking a year off for family without losing a rung on the career ladder; flexible in working hours; flexible about telecommuting.

If we don’t restructure business culture, we’re going to keep losing the talented people we’ve paid money to train.

Rosalie Mandel, principal of the alternative investments accounting firm Rothstein Kass, has changed the culture of her company. “Our firm had the vision to see the benefits of flexible scheduling – and it’s never said no. We’ve had an official flex policy since 1999,” she said in an article for The Glass Hammer.

Changes now, in attitudes, awareness, and culture could end the stagnation of small women-led businesses and make them into the economic drivers we need.

Article from inc.com

2012 Book of Lists

Having attended the 2012 launch party of Hawaii's Book of Lists, pictured are Staffing Solutions of Hawaii Contract Specialist Cassie Townsend, President Lisa Truong Kracher, Board of Directors Mary Pattee and Staffing Manager Alyson Emde.

Job Quest 2012

Staffing Solutions of Hawaii participates in annual Honolulu, Hawaii Job Quest 2012.

Pictured are (left) Staffing Coordinator Berneta Asato and (right) Contract Specialist Cassie Townsend.

Staffing Solutions of Hawaii: Holiday Hours

In observation of the holiday, Staffing Solutions of Hawaii will be closed on Monday, December 26^th.  We will resume business at our normal hours beginning on Tuesday, December 27^th at 7:30am. 

Mele Kalikimaka







Image compliments of Google.com

Mele Kalikimaka 2011

Mele Kalikimaka

Staffing Solutions of Hawaii

Happy Thanksgiving

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words,

but to live by them.  ~John Fitzgerald Kennedy

From our family to yours,

Hau’oli La Ho’omakika’i

Happy Thanksgiving

SSOH Announces Employee of the Year

Employee of the Year

We are proud of our expert employees working at Staffing Solutions. Each year, we honor one of our employees with our prestigious Associate of the Year designation. SSOH’s staffing team looks for someone who has displayed ongoing, outstanding Attitude, Dedication, Responsibility, and Growth.

2011 Employee of the Year, Edward Paz
Edward Paz has been an outstanding Staffing Solutions of Hawaii employee since September 2010. Ed quickly stood out as a person having exceptional work values and ethics throughout completing numerous temporary assignments and getting positive performance feedback from all of his managers. His easy going personality and determination to excel in any given assignment proved he was more than an average job seeker; he was looking to make a difference within our clients’ companies. As a financial accounting specialists, Edward’s background includes over 15 years of experience working with accounting, audit, project management, financial reporting and security. His experience has provided him with a skill set for sound supervisory, information technology and project management skills.

In October 2011, Ed was offered a permanent position as a Systems Administrator at a major healthcare organization. He received excellent client performance evaluations including productivity, attitude and ability to learn new tasks. His long standing record for reliability and dependable attendance combined with his dedication to see tasks completed are true testaments to why Edward has been chosen as Staffing Solutions of Hawaii’s 2011 Employee of the Year.

Edward's comments about SSOH:
"I began working for SSOH in September 2010 on a temporary accounting assignment for a major healthcare organization. From the first day I met the staff my experience has been the most positive, rewarding experience I have every encountered with any professional staffing or recruiting firm nationwide. The single most impressive quality that I will always remember about the staff of SSOH is their commitment to integrity. Simply stated, they have always done what they say they are going to do. When they committed to get back to me, they always followed through on their commitments. I quickly learned I could count on each and every member of the staff to provide a consistent level of high-quality service, which I still find refreshing.

I feel very fortunate, since joining SSOH, to have been consistently employed with quality organizations. I recently achieved my goal of obtaining a permanent job utilizing both my information technology and financial accounting skills. However, I know being consistently employed and achieving my goals are a direct result of the dedicated, positive-minded staff of SSOH who believed in me and aggressively pursued opportunities that were a great fit for my skill set. I honestly believe you will not find a more effective organization to assist you in your job search. I will continue to recommend SSOH over any other professional staffing firm to anyone I meet in the job market. I wish all my Ohana members working for SSOH best wishes in their careers."

Staffing Solutions of Hawaii

Employment and Staffing Solutions

Looking for employment? Looking for employees? For more than 20 years, Staffing Solutions of Hawaii has been the solution that connects people to jobs. Staffing Solutions of Hawaii is your one-stop resource for jobs available in Honolulu and throughout Oahu. Not only do we post jobs awaiting qualified candidates, but we also work directly with employers to match candidates with jobs.

Finding the right employee can be an overwhelming task. With Staffing Solutions of Hawaii, we focus within candidates’ areas of expertise to provide the employers with superior results (Temporary, Temporary-to-Hire, and Direct Hire). For the active Job Seekers, our staffing team will help assist you in finding the job you've been looking for based on your background and desires.